Neatorama has a very good post up about Bewitched: some of this stuff is familiar, but I for one had no idea that the exterior of Gladys Kravitz's house was later used by The Partridge Family!
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Neatorama has a very good post up about Bewitched: some of this stuff is familiar, but I for one had no idea that the exterior of Gladys Kravitz's house was later used by The Partridge Family!
Posted by Debra Hamel on September 15, 2010 at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Here's something you'll not have been expecting: recipes! Actually just the one.
Slashfood has reprinted a recipe from Frank DeCaro's Celebrity Recipe Archive for Dick Sargent's Chinese Chicken Salad. It involves rice sticks, whatever they are. If you click over to the Recipe Archive you'll see something on offer from Agnes Moorehead as well.
Tags: Agnes Moorehead, Dick Sargent, recipes
Posted by Debra Hamel on April 19, 2008 at 04:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Episode originally broadcast on 10-29-1964. See the TV.com episode guide.
The delightfully frumpy and frazzled Aunt Clara makes her first entrance into the series in this seventh episode. This time it's through the front door, her confused spell having landed her in the middle of the freeway. It's immediately clear that her impoverished powers are a problem, though that's not the principal issue of the episode. Clara has arrived for a meeting with Samantha and two older witches, Bertha and Mary, about the annual misrepresentation of witches that characterizes the Halloween season.
The four of them kick around some ideas. Mary suggests they out themselves. Bertha suggests that witch acceptance has to start with the young:
"I personally think it all begins with the children. Someone ought to rewrite those fairy tales. Well, you know: Show Hansel and Gretel for what they really are: a couple of pushy kids going around eating sweet old ladies' houses."
And Sam thinks that Darren's advertising background makes him ideally suited to help their cause.
Unfortunately, unbeknownst to Sam, Darren's just been asked by a client--Mr. Brinkman (Shelley Berman), a purveyor of Halloween candies--to create an ad campaign for his product featuring a "highly identifiable trademark" -- i.e., a long-nosed, wart-ridden witch.
Later that day, when Sam sees Darren's initial drawings for the campaign, she's infuriated. Darren doesn't understand her anger initially, which leads to a fight. She tells him that he's prejudiced and that "Mother was right": Endora had told Sam in the first episode that mortal prejudice against witches would be an issue in the marriage.
Eventually Darren is persuaded, rips up his drawing, and presents a sexy witch campaign to Brinkman--who's not pleased. Worse, Brinkman thinks Darren's nuts when he suggests that witches could be offended by a negative portrayal of themselves. Darren's compelled to repeat his comments to Larry Tate, and he rather heroically stands up for his anti-ugly witch stance without, of course, explaining the reason for it. But he loses his job over it--not for the first time (he quit in episode 3). His work situation provides the impetus for a witch-Brinkman confrontation.
With a view to getting Darren his job back, the girls--Sam, Clara, Bertha, and Mary--march on Brinkman's bedroom with signs ("Witches are people too!!") and, finally, scare him into reversing his position. Darren gets his job back, and Brinkman uses Darren's ad campaign. The campaign, we're later told, is a huge success, because, Larry says, "Mothers and children don't buy Halloween candy. Fathers do." And fathers, naturally, buy candy advertised by sexy cartoon witches. I find this very hard to believe--the fathers buying candy bit--but it allows the show to make its point: advertisers needn't stoop to negative stereotypes; by not doing so they're not only doing the right thing, they're doing something that's good for their bottom line.
This episode offers an interesting plot, of course, because of the real-world issues of racial stereotyping and discrimination. But Darren points out the problem of a too-easy analogy: most people don't believe in witches, he notes, so how can they be discriminating against them? So, serious societal issues are here translated into the fantastic, non-threatening world of small-screen comedy. They're kicked around and solved, at least in a small way. Perhaps societal tensions are thereby eased. Or perhaps the audience leaves the den having unwittingly engaged in some internal debate about the issues at hand. Comedy does have its serious side, after all.
Posted by Debra Hamel on March 08, 2008 at 11:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)
Richard Baer died on February 22nd. He wrote, according to this obituary, 23 episodes of Bewitched--as well as episodes of pretty much every other show people like me grew up on: F Troop, The Munsters, M*A*S*H, and so on. (See also his entry at IMDB.) The first episode he wrote for Bewitched was Driving is the Only Way to Fly, the 26th episode of season 1. (Interestingly, that episode was also Paul Lynde's first appearance on the show.)
Posted by Debra Hamel on March 03, 2008 at 09:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
I'm not sure what prompted her to do it, but Gracie over at Open 24 Hours has a gallery of art work that appeared in the Stephens' home. See also her recreation of the Stephens' living room.
Posted by Debra Hamel on February 26, 2008 at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Episode originally broadcast on 10-22-1964. See the TV.com episode guide.
Early morning, Darrin's-late-for-the-train, would-be kitchen sex is interrupted by the Stevens' doorbell: a certain Marshall Burns is at the door, a little boy played by Jimmy Mathers (younger brother of Leave It To Beaver's Jerry Mathers). Marshall is ready for his morning tryst with Samantha. It seems she's his only friend in the neighborhood, and he regularly stops by for breakfast. He's fatherless and the victim of a "nervous, overprotective mother." Said mother--played by June Lockhart with a Southern accent--soon hunts Marshall down and a cat-fight nearly erupts in the Stevens' kitchen. Mrs. Burns does not appreciate Samantha's interference in her son's life, and Samantha is very judgmental about the woman's parenting.
The disagreement is soon played out on a baseball diamond. Sam takes Marshall to the local baseball tryouts because his mother won't allow him to play, baseball being a dangerous sport. (Gladys is in the stands at the tryouts, fawning over her "beautiful" nephew Floyd, who's the star of the team. Witchcraft naturally ensues as Sam gives Marshall a wicked curveball, with which he strikes out Floyd.) Marshall, of course, makes the team. He later runs off without his mother's consent to play in the first game of the season in which, naturally if unrealistically, he plays extremely well--sans witchcraft. All ends happily: Marshall's mother sees the ilght and winds up encouraging her son; the baseball coach takes a shine to Mrs. Burns once he finds out she's a widow; and Marshall wins the game for his team.
This isn't a particularly good episode. The series' plot is not furthered. Only the Kravitzes, among regular guest stars, show up. It's interesting, as usual, because it's dated: the episode opens with Sam being pestered by a door-to-door salesman--a figure thankfully long gone from our suburban streets. And Darrin, driving to the baseball game, goes the speed limit--15 miles per hour, we're told.
Also of interest is the characterization of overprotectiveness. Marshall's mother is certainly...careful: she's constantly afraid that Marshall will get sick and she won't allow him to eat strawberries or play ball. On the other hand, he finds his way into the Stevens' house regularly and tries out for the baseball team without his mother's knowledge or consent--driving off in a car with an unrelated adult. How does that happen when his mother is allegedly watching him like a hawk?
Join a conversation among parents of youngish kids these days and the talk will eventually get around to how much more carefully watched our kids are than we were; how we roamed our neighborhoods alone at a young age and did things we'd never allow our kids to do. Marshall's childhood falls somewhere between the two experiences: he's allowed to do risky things like fraternize with strange adults, but he can't play with kids his own age. Odd.
Posted by Debra Hamel on February 08, 2008 at 02:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Elizabeth Montgomery got a star on Hollywood's Walk of of Fame yesterday.
Posted by Debra Hamel on January 05, 2008 at 08:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
This 2005 adaptation of Bewitched is not simply a remake of the 1960s sitcom. Will Ferrell stars as near has-been actor Jack Wyatt, who's to play Darrin in a new Bewitched series. So as not be overshadowed by a big-name female lead, he wants to hire an unknown for the role of Samantha, and to move the focus of the show to Darrin. Nicole Kidman, meanwhile, stars as Isabel Bigelow, a real-life witch who comes to live among mortals with a view to finding true love--a commodity hard to come by in her world because of the potential for achieving instant gratification via witchcraft. Jack, needless to say, discovers Isabel--he espies her twitching her nose through a bookstore's shelves--and convinces her to take on the role of Samantha. A romance ensues, with various setbacks prompted largely by Jack's general obnoxiousness, but in the end we all leave the theater happy.
As the above suggests, Bewitched the movie plays with mixing up the real and fictional worlds: Isabel and Jack are a witch and mortal who fall in love while pretending to be a witch and mortal who fall in love. But the playfulness goes farther than that. Isabel happens to have an Aunt Clara who's given to popping in for visits via the chimney, for example--a coincidence that doesn't really make sense but is, I suppose, cute. And toward the movie's end Uncle Arthur (played by Steve Carrell doing a decent impersonation of Paul Lynde) appears to Jack as a sort of warlock ex machina: its his intervention that saves the day...except that he's apparently only a hallucination. That doesn't make a lot of sense either, but it is, I suppose, cute. The perfectly charming Michael Caine stars as Isabel's perfectly charming father, Nigel Bigalow, who tries to dissuade Isabel from slumming it with the mortals, just as Endora, in the series, opposes Samantha's stay among mortals. But Nigel winds up falling himself for Iris Smythson (Shirley MacLaine), the actress who plays Endora in the series. In an interesting twist, Iris hints around that she just might be a witch herself, and we don't know for sure what her status is until much later in the movie.
And the playfulness goes a little deeper yet. In the movie, Jack and Isabel are remaking the first episode of the real Bewitched series. We're shown a few black-and-white clips of Elizabeth Montgomery and Dick York. The new series follows the storyline of the original first episode to an extent: the new Darrin and Sam meet by bumping into each other, just as the old Darrin and Sam did, and they go to dinner at Darrin's old girlfriend's house. What's interesting is that what happened at the dinner party in the original series is not recreated faithfully in the new episode, but it is recreated in Jack and Isabel's real life. Jack's soon-to-be ex-wife is Sheila (the name of the old Darrin's ex-girlfriend), who makes a crack to Isabel about rhinoplasty (just as Sheila did to Samantha in the old series), prompting Isabel to resort to witchcraft in response (just as Samantha did).
If all this sounds a bit dizzying, well, it's not so bad when you see it acted out. The plot doesn't always stand up to logical scrutiny (why is Isabel's Samantha doll twitching its nose at her?), but the movie is fun and cute and sweet. Not a bad feel-good flick.
Tags: Will Ferrell, Nicole Kidman, Michael Caine, Bewitched
Posted by Debra Hamel on December 20, 2007 at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
I'm a little late hearing about this, but reportedly a pilot episode has been made for a new Bewitched series in England, and "the BBC is in talks to introduce a whole series...."
I wonder: if Bewitched were to be made in the U.S. again, what actors would you get to play the various parts?
Posted by Debra Hamel on December 07, 2007 at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Episode originally broadcast on 10-15-1964. See the TV.com episode guide.
This is an interesting episode because it's the first which revolves around an advertising campaign Darrin is working on. Sure, we met Rex Barker in episode 3, but Darrin's work on the Barker campaign was not central to the story. This time around Darrin is feverishly trying to come up with a campaign that will keep "Old Man Caldwell" (played by Charlie Ruggles) of Caldwell's Soup from going to another advertising agency. Darrin's stuck for ideas. He's stressed out. When we encounter him he's, well, very un-Darrin Stevens-like--smoking and unkempt and his shirt's untucked. He's been up all night:
This is how he looks when Sam finds him. Then he hurries to take a shower (which strikes me as unusual for a 60s sitcom, what with its implication of naked bathing, but perhaps I'm wrong). It may be the fastest shower known to man: from the time Darrin walks into the bathroom to the time he emerges, 39 seconds elapse.
While Darrin's rinsing off, however, Sam takes a look at his work, and we get to see some nice shots of the sort of ads that put McMann and Tate on top:
Sam tells Darrin what she thinks
Samantha: "I think those layouts are cute."
Darrin: "Cute? Uninspired, pedestrian trash, that's what they are. But they're close."
Again, I may be wrong, but it seems to me that no one would speak of "uninspired, pedestrian trash" on a sitcom anymore. The phrase seems to imply a fairly literate audience.
Now comes the shocking part. While Darrin's in the bathroom, changing into his suit, Samantha takes another look at his drawings. The drawings he's been up all night working on. And without so much as an "is it okay if I deface your work?" she picks up a thick marker and starts making changes to them. Okay, sure, she's got some good ideas--and he's initially delighted and then upset because he assumes she's done it by magic, and then she's upset because he thinks she's lying and that she has no innate, non-witchy imagination--but the point is: you don't take a marker to someone's artwork, especially when he's got to show it to a client at lunch time.
The marital discord goes rather far in this one. Darrin's unfair to Sam, as usual, and only recognizes he's wrong after the fact. (Of course, Darrin doesn't realize he's wrong until some external event proves it; strangely, Sam never seems to find this in the least offensive.) Sam dons witch robes and takes off with her mother. Darrin goes to work unshaven and maybe even under the influence. In the end, of course, it all works out: Caldwell, it turns out, doesn't like her ideas. Which implies that they're not magical.
At Darrin and Larry's meeting with the client we get this charming bit of dialogue:
Caldwell: "It has no good old-fashioned romance in it."
Darrin: "You mean, you really don't like it?"
Caldwell: "No warmth. No love. No sex."
Larry: "Sex?!"
Caldwell: "Well, I don't suppose there are many of us left who look upon soup as having sex appeal, but I do. I always will."
I just love that last episode of Caldwell's.
The episode ends in an interesting way. Sam says something that gives Darrin another idea for the Caldwell soup campaign, and it emerges (in a conversation between Sam and Endora) that she planted that idea on purpose, although she pretends to him that it's all very innocent. She's manipulating him, in other words, while playing dumb. It's an example of how she wields a sort of quiet power--stroking his tender ego, being the more mature of the two--despite that he's the ostensible pants-wearer of the family. So maybe Darrin isn't wrong to doubt her earlier on....
A colorized version of the episode, in three parts, is available on YouTube (see below). Feel free to share your thoughts about it in the comments.
Some random comments:
Posted by Debra Hamel on December 01, 2007 at 08:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)